3D Printing: Hype vs. Reality

Will 3D Printing Really Change The World?

The factory of the future is located on the second floor of a nondescript building in New York’s Long Island City, a Queens neighborhood right across the river from Manhattan. The 25,000-square-foot, bright-white-walled space, which houses the Shapeways production facility, is occupied by some 30 young, content-looking workers and 11 bulky 3D printers.

“It was an empty warehouse. It was forgotten,” says the firm’s CEO, Peter Weijmarshausen, a Dutch-born 3D-printing evangelist with intense gray eyes, of the space before the company moved in. Now the warehouse is home to “a new type of manufacturing, where everything that is made is made to custom order,” Weijmarshausen says, before granting a guided tour of the factory. “And it’s only made when you order it.”

Founded in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, in 2007, Shapeways is now headquartered in Manhattan. The way it works is relatively simple: Users upload their 3D designs to Shapeways’ website; it then prints them out in plastic or another material, and ships the final product to the designer. (On a good day, Weijmarshausen says, Shapeways sends 2,000 or more parts out the door.) In addition, the Shapeways website currently hosts more than 11,000 virtual shops where users can sell their 3D-printed wares — bestselling items include whimsical cufflinks shaped like moustaches and incredibly intricate stainless-steel gaming dice. (Think a futuristic, nerdier Etsy.) Weijmarshausen says that the Shapeways model allows for nimbleness that mass-manufacturing cannot provide.

During the fall 2012 ribbon-cutting ceremony for the factory, Mayor Michael Bloomberg declared in no uncertain terms, “This is the future of our city.” Indeed, Makerbot, a company that makes affordable desktop 3D printers, also recently opened a New York factory, this one in Brooklyn. These companies are creating manufacturing jobs in a metropolis that has hemorrhaged them — 93% of the one million manufacturing jobs the city had during World War II are now gone, per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Shapeways anticipates hiring another 50 workers for its Long Island City factory alone (the facility has room for 39 more printers). In addition, Weijmarshausen says, “There are several small startups that use Shapeways as a manufacturing back end” — he points to customizable-figurine company Mixee Me — “and without us, they couldn’t have started their company and created those jobs.”

But despite some of the breathless reports you may have read or heard about a “second Industrial Revolution” — one in which 3D printing will replace conventional manufacturing and bring back the jobs we’ve lost to the Chinese — the truth of the matter is much more modest, according to industry analysts. 3D printing can do many incredible things, certainly, but the idea that the United States will once again become a manufacturing powerhouse because of this technology is far-fetched. So where does the hype end and the reality begin?